"The Chavez camp will try to build on an idealised image of the late president, " he says.

BBC: Venezuelan parties gear up for polls after Chavez death

According to Mr Goldnadel, France's leftist press idealised the former Resistance fighter, a strong critic of Israeli policy, as a "secular saint".

BBC: Inspirational French writer Stephane Hessel dies at 95

It begins with an idealised colonial-era oil portrait, of Moctezuma as the epitome of the noble savage, with feathered shield and spear.

ECONOMIST: A triumphant decoding of an elusive potentate

As a young man, he was excited by the French revolution, and he retained an idealised view of Napoleon to the end of his life.

ECONOMIST: Literary lives (1)

"Obama is the perfect family man, with a beautiful wife and children straight out of the Saturday Evening Post", the home of Norman Rockwell's idealised images of Middle America.

BBC: NEWS | Americas | White House hopefuls begin race

This is a special type of Earth model which traces its idealised "horizontal" surface - the plane on which, at any point, the pull of gravity is perpendicular to it.

BBC: Europe's Goce satellite probes Earth's gravity

Their idealised version of this question was to ask how two signal chemicals, starting from opposite ends of an embryo, could result in a pattern that looked like the French flag (ie, three different coloured vertical stripes).

ECONOMIST: Genetic engineering

Behn's high-nosed, thin-lipped and French-educated Oroonoko is essentially an idealised European prince in blackface, while the sighs and tremblings of the lovers and the wanton dalliance of the king have an air of cupids and harpsichords and peeping breasts.

ECONOMIST: Theatre at Stratford

It's the difference between the idealised rural England (slivers of tour-bus Oxfordshire) and the real countryside of bungalow-sprawl, derelict factory units, impromptu rubbish tips in woodland glades, sinister hamburger-tossers in laybys, empurpled stand-offs over travellers' sites and local people who find themselves stranded by everyone from bus companies to banks.

BBC: News